The Unit
Ninni Holmqvist, 2006 (trans., 2008)
Other Press
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590513132
Summary
One day in early spring, Dorrit Weger is checked into the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological material. She is promised a nicely furnished apartment inside the Unit, where she will make new friends, enjoy the state of the art recreation facilities, and live the few remaining days of her life in comfort with people who are just like her.
Here, women over the age of fifty and men over sixty–single, childless, and without jobs in progressive industries–are sequestered for their final few years; they are considered outsiders. In the Unit they are expected to contribute themselves for drug and psychological testing, and ultimately donate their organs, little by little, until the final donation.
Despite the ruthless nature of this practice, the ethos of this near-future society and the Unit is to take care of others, and Dorrit finds herself living under very pleasant conditions: well-housed, well-fed, and well-attended. She is resigned to her fate and discovers her days there to be rather consoling and peaceful. But when she meets a man inside the Unit and falls in love, the extraordinary becomes a reality and life suddenly turns unbearable. Dorrit is faced with compliance or escape, and...well, then what?
The Unit is a gripping exploration of a society in the throes of an experiment, in which the “dispensable” ones are convinced under gentle coercion of the importance of sacrificing for the “necessary” ones. Ninni Holmqvist has created a debut novel of humor, sorrow, and rage about love, the close bonds of friendship, and about a cynical, utilitarian way of thinking disguised as care. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Ninni Holmqvist was born in 1958 and lives in Skane, Sweden. She made her debut in 1995 with the short story collection Suit [Kostym] and has published two further collections of short stories since then. She also works as a translator.The Unit marks Holmqvist’s debut as a novelist (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A haunting, deadpan tale set vaguely in the Scandinavian future…Holmqvist’s spare prose interweaves The Unit’s pleasures and cruelties with exquisite matter-of-factness.... [Holmqvist] turns the screw, presenting a set of events so miraculous and abominable that they literally made me gasp.
Marcela Valdes - Washington Post
This haunting first novel imagines a nation in which men and women who haven’t had children by a certain age are taken to a “reserve bank unit for biological material” and subjected to various physical and psychological experiments, while waiting to have their organs harvested for “needed” citizens in the outside world… Holmqvist evocatively details the experiences of a woman who falls in love with another resident, and at least momentarily attempts to escape her fate.
The New Yorker
Swedish author Holmqvist's unconvincing debut, part of a wave of dystopias hitting this summer, is set in a near future where men and women deemed "dispensable" — those unattached, childless, employed in nonessential professions — are checked into reserve bank units for biological material and become organ donors and subjects of pharmaceutical and psychological experiments. When Dorrit Weger, who has lived her adult life isolated and on the brink of poverty, is admitted to the unit, she finds, to her surprise, comfort, friendship and love. Though the residents are under constant surveillance, their accommodations are luxurious, and in their shared plight they develop an intimacy rarely enjoyed in the outside world. But an unlikely development forces Dorrit to confront unexpected choices. Unfortunately, Holmqvist fails to fully sell the future she posits, and Dorrit's underdeveloped voice doesn't do much to convey the direness of her situation. Holmqvist's exploration of female desire, human need and the purpose of life has its moments, but the novel suffers in comparison with similar novels such as The Handmaid's Tale and Never Let Me Go.
Publishers Weekly
Chilling...stunning...Holmqvist’s fluid, mesmerizing novel offers unnerving commentary on the way society devalues artistic creation while elevating procreation, and speculation on what it would be like if that was taken to an extreme. For Orwell and Huxley fans.
Booklist
Pricey shops that require no money. Gardens that trump Monet's. Creature comforts galore. But Swedish ace Holmqvist's English-language debut soon discloses a catch. The shelf-life for inhabitants of this paradise is about six years. This is the Second Reserve Bank Unit, into which the State herds women 50 and up, and men 60 and over, to use for biological material. They're fattened like calves, but there's civic-duty payback: mandatory organ donation, culminating in the final "gift" of their lungs and hearts. Big Brother doesn't take every oldster, just those termed "dispensables": the cash-strapped, underachieving or, worst of all, childless. Dorrit Weger, freelance writer, dog-lover and free sprit, is initially mesmerized by her new surroundings. She feels a sense of community, a closeness never offered by Nils, the inadequate lover who would never leave his wife. And she takes pride in being needed when she's enlisted in one of the Unit's many medical experiments. It's a benign investigation into the effects of exercise, but in the cafeteria and on the lush grounds Dorrit soon notices other campers sleepwalking like zombies or displaying weirdly blotched skin. As her roommates are ushered off one by one to their final donations, she panics into the arms of Johannes, a fellow Unit resident who actually manages to impregnate her. Dazzled by upcoming motherhood, Dorrit is certain her bulging belly will gain her freedom. Proven at last productive, she's bound to be rewarded by the State...isn't she? In her first novel, short-story writer Holmqvist echoes political-science treatises like Hobbes' Leviathan and Rousseau's The Social Contract (gone decidedly mad here), as well as the usual dystopian novels from Brave New World to 1984. Orwellian horrors in a Xanadu on Xanax—creepily profound and most provocative.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Dorrit can be described as very obedient. She submits to her fate by going to the Unit without protest and does not seem naturally inclined to buck authority. What personality traits or life circumstances do you think causes a person to be obedient? Conversely, what leads one to question the rules of the establishment? Are you the type to question or accept the status quo? What do you think makes you that way?
2. In The Unit, the residents are surrounded by luxuries they did not know in their former lives outside. The food is abundant, fresh, and masterfully prepared and presented. Their apartments are comfortable and well-appointed. They have access state-of-the-art exercise facilities, and can shop in lovely boutiques in exchange for no money whatsoever. How do you see the availability these creature comforts to the indispensables? As perks? Mere distractions? How is this different from the meaning you might attach to these things in your own life?
3. Although she was content, owned a home with a garden, had a dog she loved, and a love affair with Nils, Dorrit was deemed by the state to be dispensable. To whom or to what was Dorrit's presence necessary? What determines one's worth? In order for our lives to have meaning, do you feel that we must make a contribution to greater society?
4. Dorrit comes from a big family—she was one of five children. And yet she describes them as being "scattered to the winds like a dandelion clock." What caused her family to become so disconnected? In thinking about your own life, what things do you do to maintain a family bond? What significance does family hold for you?
5. Dorrit finds more love and companionship,in the Unit than she ever did in her former life. Why do you suppose intimacy comes easier to her in the Unit? Do you think she ever would have developed deep friendships outside? Why or why not?
6. There are many gifted artists in residence at the Unit. Dorrit's writing comes much easier to her there than it did at home. What is it about the Unit that enables such creativity to come to the fore?
7. Dorrit was raised in the time before the laws about organ donations and indispensables were enacted, in the post-women's lib era when independence was encouraged and valued. Dorrit's mother, having raised five children and seeing the possibilities that lay before her three daughters, discourages them from getting "caught in a trap" by a having children and getting married. Yet these women live to see values shift once again to the point where a woman's life is only of value if she is a mother. How is Dorrit a product of her time but also trapped by it? Discuss the paradox of being a feminist in a society where your life only has meaning if you provide for others.
8. Why do you think that, despite their closeness and Dorrit's pregnancy, Johannes makes his final donation without consulting Dorrit and without saying goodbye in a deliberate way? In what ways is this decision selfish? Selfless? Do you think Johannes did the right thing? Why or why not?
9. Why does Dorrit abandon her escape attempt and return to the Unit? What would you have done?
10. Several times over the course of the novel, the society is referred to as a democracy. In what sense is it a fully democratic society? Are the people in the wider community truly free? What freedoms are afforded to the dispensables?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Little Children
Tom Perrotta, 2005
St. Martin's Press
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312315733
Summary
Tom Perrotta's thirtyish parents of young children are a varied and surprising bunch. There's Todd, the handsome stay-at-home dad dubbed "The Prom King" by the moms at the playground, and his wife, Kathy, a documentary filmmaker envious of the connection Todd has forged with their toddler son. And there's Sarah, a lapsed feminist surprised to find she's become a typical wife in a traditional marriage, and her husband, Richard, who is becoming more and more involved with an internet fantasy life than with his own wife and child. And then there's Mary Ann, who has life all figured out, down to a scheduled roll in the hay with her husband every Tuesday at nine P.M.
They all raise their kids in the kind of quiet suburb where nothing ever seems to happen—until one eventful summer, when a convicted child molester moves back to town, and two parents begin an affair that goes further than either of them could ever have imagined. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 13, 1961
• Where—Summit, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.A., Syracuse University
• Awards—Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writer's Conference
• Currently—Belmont, Massachusetts
Tom Perrotta is the author of several works of fiction, including Joe College, Election, Little Children and The Leftovers. Both Election and Little Children were adapted to film: Election, in 1999, starred Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick; Little Children, in 2006, starred Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly.
Perrotta has taught expository writing at Yale and Harvard University and has been called "one of our true genius satirists" by Mystic River author, Dennis LeHane. Newsweek hailed him as "one of America's best-kept literary secrets...like an American Nick Hornby." Perrotta lives with this wife and two children in Belmont, Massachusetts. (Adapted from the publisher.)
More
That Tom Perrotta struggled into his early 30s to find success should come as no surprise to fans of his work. A Yale grad, Perrotta studied writing under Thomas Berger and Tobias Wolff before moving on to teach creative writing at Yale and Harvard. It was during this period that he began work on the stories that would comprise his first release, Bad Haircut. He had finished two more novels (including Election, which would prove to be his breakthrough book) before Bad Haircut was finally picked up by a publisher in 1994.
It wasn't until a chance introduction with a screenwriter that Perrotta finally moved into the public eye. The result of that encounter was the publication of Election (1998), which was made into the much-beloved film starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. At last, Perrotta was able to call himself a working novelist.
The theme of ordinary people trapped in lives they never imagined runs throughout Perrotta's novels. Success for his characters is always just out of reach, and the world is always just outside of their control. Characters that seem destined for success serve as foils to the true protagonists, constant reminders of the unfairness of life.
Which is not to say that Perrotta's novels are depressing. On the contrary, his razor-sharp observations of the human condition are often side-splittingly funny, and the compassion he exhibits in his writing makes even the most ostensibly unlikable characters sympathetic. Perotta does not create caricatures; his novels work because he has a basic understanding that life is complex, and everyone has a story if you take the time to listen.
Extras
When asked in a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview what book most influenced his career as a writer, here's his response:
I read The Great Gatsby in high school and was hypnotized by the beauty of the sentences and moved by the story about the irrevocability of lost love. I've reread it several times since then and have discovered lots of other layers—Nick's idolization of Gatsby, the perverse Horatio Alger narrative of Gatsby's rise in the world, Fitzgerald's keen eye for the hard realities of social class in America—and I still maintain that even if there's no such thing as a perfect novel, Gatsby's about as close as we're going to get.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
This soccer-mom Bovary, like the original, grasps the fundamental sadness of characters trapped in middle-class stability and yearning for adventures gone by. But Mr. Perrotta is too generous a writer to trivialize that. What distinguishes Little Children from run-of-the-mill suburban satire is its knowing blend of slyness and compassion.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Little Children, like all Perrotta's work, is a virtuoso set of overlapping character studies, the sort of book where both a remorseless Stepford mom and an accused child molester can inspire pity and show themselves more than capable of their own sorts of compassion.... Tom Perrotta is, indeed, all grown up now, and Little Children, is a greatly auspicious and instructive encounter with the dread world of maturity.
Chris Lehmann - Washington Post
The eponymous children in this satirical novel are actually adults who, chafing at the burdens of parenthood, try to re-create their unencumbered youth. Sarah, an overeducated young homemaker, likens her tantrum-prone daughter to a “brooding Russian epileptic” out of Dostoevsky, and pines for lost college days of feminism and bisexuality. While her husband orders used panties online, she has furtive sex with a stay-at-home dad whose repeated failure to pass the bar has earned him the contempt of his gorgeous wife. The humor is sometimes cruel, but Perrotta never betrays the complexity of his characters. For all Sarah’s sins—neglecting her child, wallowing in romantic delusions—there’s something almost brave about her refusal to join the supermoms drilling their toddlers with dreams of Harvard, and about her yearning for more than “a painfully ordinary life."
The New Yorker
[I]ntelligent, absorbing tale of suburban angst…. Perrotta views his characters with a funny, acute and sympathetic eye…. Once again, he proves himself an expert at exploring the roiling psychological depths beneath the placid surface of suburbia.
Publishers Weekly
[A] penetrating and absorbing portrait of three suburban couples and their failed marriages.… Perrotta's poignant and unflinching prose skillfully evokes both sympathy for his characters and disdain for the convenience they have chosen. Highly recommended. — Karen T. Bilton, Somerset Cty. Lib., Bridgewater, NJ.
Library Journal
[A] complex, fast-moving plot. Darker than such sprightly entertainments as Joe College (2000) and The Wishbones (1997).… Perrotta charts his several characters' interconnected misadventures are handled with masterly authority. An accomplished comic novelist extends his range brilliantly. Perrotta's best.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Little Children:
1. Is Little Children an appropriate or deceptive title for this novel? Can you think of the different ways the phrase is employed within the book? To what characters does it best apply? In the end, is the title simply descriptive, or does it work on multiple levels?
2. Which characters do you sympathize most with in the novel, and why? Which characters are the least sympathetic? Do your sympathies shift over course of the novel?
3. What does Todd want from Sarah? What does Sarah want from Todd? Are they in love, or simply using each other to escape from bad marriages and/or unhappy lives?
4. Very few criminals in our culture are more vilified than pedophiles. What do you make of the portrayal of Ronnie McGorvey? Is he a uniquely evil character in the novel? Or is he more similar to some of the other characters than they'd like to admit? Is he treated fairly by the people in the town?
5. Is Larry justified in his obsession with Ronnie? Are his methods simply unorthodox, or he is a bully who's lost his moral compass? In the end, does he do more harm than good?
6. How are children portrayed in this novel? What do you make of such details as Aaron's jester's hat, Big Bear, and the games Train Wreck and Car Doctor? Do Todd and Sarah have different attitudes toward their children, and toward themselves as parents?
7. What role does sports play in the novel? Why is Todd so fascinated with the skateboarders? What need does the football team address in his life?
8. When Sarah and Mary Ann argue about Madame Bovary at the book group, what are they really arguing about? Which one makes the most convincing argument about Emma Bovary, and by extension, about the characters in Little Children?
9. How do the characters' pasts influence their behaviors within the novel? Who is trying to escape the past? Who is trying to relive it? Who is simply repeating it?
10. A critic has suggested that "all the noncriminal [characters] in this story are better off in the end than they were at the start." Is this true? Can you think of any exceptions?
11. Critics have differed a great deal in characterizing the tone of the novel. One called it a "gentle satire," while another claimed that "Perrotta has moved into the suburbs with a wrecking ball." Which critic do you agree with? How do you account for this discrepancy in these descriptions?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Until They Bring the Streetcars Back
Stanley Gordon West, 1997
Lexington-Marshall Publishing
274 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780965624763
Summary
Until They Bring The Streetcars Back serves up a nostalgic journey through the streets of post-war 1949 Saint Paul, those wistful days of ten-cent sodas, big band music, and burning leaves. Stanley West weaves rollicking humor, riveting suspense and a bittersweet love story into the fabric of those optimistic times.
A harmless prank, a chance conversation and Cal Gant (in the friendly neighborhoods of his idyllic life) stumbles onto the naked face of cruelty, incest and murder. When he attempts to rescue a strange and haunting girl from the slaughterhouse her life has become, he finds himself in a heart-stopping struggle with her ruthless father, leading Cal to the brink of self-doubt, terror and death itself. Can he find within himself the backbone to stand against the horror, the daring to concoct some scheme to set Gretchen free? Until They Bring The Streetcars Back is the gripping story of what Cal does. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1932-33
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Minnesota
• Awards—4 Emmy Awards for Amos
• Currently—lives in Montana
Stanley West was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. While growing up he got around town riding the streetcars. He graduated from Central High School in 1950. He attended Macalester College and the University of Minnesota, receiving a degree in 1955. He moved from the Midwest to Montana in 1964 and has made his home there since.
His novel Amos was produced as a CBS Movie of the Week starring Kirk Douglas and was nominated for four Emmys. The novel stirred national controversy over abuse of the aged in America. When Kirk Douglas testified before congress and wrote in the New York Times on the issue, he pointed out that animals had been protected by law for one hundred years before children or the aged. West's Amos focused on the aged. (From the publisher.)
West is also author of Sweet Shattered Dreams, Blind Your Ponies, To Ride a Dead Horse, Finding Laura Buggs, Until They Bring the Streetcars Back, and Growing an Inch. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
If you can accept the implausibility of much of the action and the flatness of some of the characters, you'll find that this story demands emotional involvement. Cal's life is substantially changed and threatened by his circumstances, his own actions and the weight of the law.
Armchair Interviews.com
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Until They Bring the Streetcars Back:
1. Talk about Calvin as a character. Do you find him a realistic portrayal of adolescent angst...or heroism?
2. Discuss Gretchen and her situation. Why, for instance, does her father make her wear ugly dresses? What else does he do to Gretchen? What does Gretchen tell Cal, and why does he decide to help her? How does he feel toward Gretchen at first, and in what way does his attitude change?
3. Talk about the Gant family—their interactions with one another, and the fact that none of them ever cries openly, only in secret. Are they typical, do you think, of the era...or not? How different are families today?... or not? What attitude, for instance, does Cal's father have toward parents who hit their children? Describe Calvin's relationship with his father, in particular? What does Cal learn about his father (Chapter 31)?
4. Pastor Ostrum defines love in this way: “Love wasn't having a warm feeling but it was a decision you make, and Love is not something we wait to have happen to us, but something we do." What does he mean and how does this concept play out in the course of the novel?
5. What do the two incidents—Gretchen and shoes and what Calvin attempts to do for the MCCluskey's dog—have in common; what do the two events reveal about Calvin?
6. How do the supposed protectors of the young—Cal's father, the counselor, pastor, police—respond to what Cal tries to tell them regarding Gretchen? Why doesn't Gretchen tell someone about her father? Does Mr. Luttermann ever get his just deserts?
7. Can breaking the law ever be justified, even if it's to help someone in trouble? In this case, did Calvin have an alternative? What else might he haven done?
8. Comment on the story about Uncle Emil that Cal remembers while he's in jail. And what about the line: "You climbed on, now you gotta ride it out." What does it mean to Calivn?
8. What is the role of public transportation in this novel? And what is the significance of the title?
8. How does Calvin change, what does he come to learn by the end of the book? Was what he gave up worth it? Who else changes by the end of the book?
9. If you're from St. Paul, what has changed from this book's depiction of the city in the 1950s? What has remained the same?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Chuck Palahniuk, 2007
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307275837
Summary
Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors, and relations have their say on this evil character, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time
Buster Casey was every small kid born in a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. The high school rebel who always wins—and a childhood murderer?—Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton into the big city and becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where, on designated nights, the participants recognize each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails, "Just Married" toothpaste graffiti, and other refuse, then look for special markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It’s in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey makes three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds, causing a silent, urban plague of rabies.
Expect hilarity, horror, and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He’s the postmillennial Jonathan Swift, the man to watch to learn what’s, uh-oh, coming next. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 21, 1962
• Where—Pasco, Washington, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Oregon
• Currently—lives in Portland, Oregon
Readers of Chuck Palahniuk's novels must gird themselves for the bizarre, the violent, the macabre, and the just plain disturbing. Having done that, they can then just enjoy the ride.
The story goes that Palahniuk wrote Fight Club out of frustration. Believing that his first submission to publishers (an early version of Invisible Monsters) was being rejected as too risky, he decided to take the gloves off, so to speak, and wrote something he never expected to see the light of day. Ironically, Fight Club was accepted for publication, and its subsequent filming by directory David Fincher earned the author an obsessive cult following.
The apocalyptic, blackly humorous story of a loner's entanglement with a charismatic but dangerous underground leader, Fight Club was the first in a series of controversial fiction that would keep Palahniuk in the spotlight. Since then, he has crafted strange, disturbing tales around unlikely subjects: a disfigured model bent on revenge (the revised Invisible Monsters) ... the last surviving member of a death cult (Survivor) ... a sex addict who resorts to a bizarre restaurant scam to pay the bills (Choke) ... a lethal African nursery rhyme (Lullaby) ... and so the list continues.
Although Palahniuk makes occasional forays into nonfiction, (e.g., Fugitives and Refugees and Stranger than Fiction), it is his novels that generate the most buzz. His outre plots and jump-cut storytelling are definitely not for everyone—some have likened them to the horrible accident you can't tear your eyes away from—but even critics can't help but be impressed by his flair for language, his talent for satire, and his sheer originality. Newsday wrote, "Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time. He rearranges Vonnegut's sly humor, DeLillo's mordant social analysis, and Pynchon's antic surrealism (or is it R. Crumb's?) into a gleaming puzzle palace all his own."
Palahniuk has said that he has heard a lot from readers who were never readers before they saw his books, from boys in schools where his books are banned. This might be the best evidence that Palahniuk is a writer for a new age, introducing a (mostly male) audience to worlds on the page that usually only exist in technicolor nightmares.
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• Palahniuk (pronounced paul-a-nik) worked as a diesel mechanic for a trucking company before he became an author, jotting story notes for The Fight Club under trucks he was supposed to be working on.
• Palahniuk's family has had a sad history of violence: His grandfather killed his grandmother and then committed suicide; later in life, his divorced father was murdered in 1999 by a girlfriend's ex-husband. The killer was convicted and sentenced to death in October, 2001. Palahniuk's book, Choke, was driven by an attempt to look at how sexual compulsion can destroy.
• When not working on his novels, Palahniuk has written features for Gear magazine, through which he befriended shock rocker Marilyn Manson. While writing, Palahniuk has said he listens to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Radiohead.
• To a reader who asked in a Barnes & Noble.com chat why the novel Invisible Monsters was not released in hardcover, Palahniuk responded: "My original request was not to have any of my books released as hardcovers because I felt guilty asking for over $20 for anything I had done. With Invisible Monsters I finally got my way."
• Invisible Monsters was inspired by fashion magazines Palahniuk was reading at his laundromat, according to an interview with the Village Voice. "I love the language of fashion magazines. Eighteen adjectives and you find the word sweater at the end. 'Ethereal. Sacred.' I thought, Wouldn't it be fun to write a novel in this fashion magazine language, so packed with hyperbole?"
•When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is his response:
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It showed me how to write a "hero" story by using an apostle as the narrator. Really, it's the basis of the triangle of two men and one woman in my book, Fight Club. I read the book at least once a year and it continues to surprise me with layers of emotion.
(Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Mr. Palahniuk doesn't write for tourists. He writes for hard-core devotees drawn to the wild, angry imagination on display and the taboo-busting humor.
New York Times
One of the most feverish imaginations in American letters.... More than your weekly prescribed dose of humor and humanity, cleverness and outrage.
Washington Post
Brilliant...extremely fun.... With his love of contemporary fairytales that are gritty and dirty rather than pretty, Palahniuk is the likeliest inheritor of Vonnegut's place in American writing.
San Francisco Chronicle
Palahniuk is no Studs Terkel, but Terkel's heartland probably looks more like Palahniuk's nowadays. —Keir Graff
Booklist
Buster Casey, destined to live fast, die young and murder as many people as he can, is the rotten seed at the core of Palahniuk's comically nasty eighth novel (after Haunted; Lullaby; Diary; etc.). Set in a future where urbanites are segregated by strict curfews into Daytimers and Nighttimers, the narrative unfolds as an oral history comprising contradictory accounts from people who knew Buster. These include childhood friends horrified by the boy's macabre behavior (getting snakes, scorpions and spiders to bite him and induce instant erections; repeatedly infecting himself with rabies), policemen and doctors who had dealings with the rabies "superspreader"; and Party Crashers, thrill-seeking Nighttimers who turn city streets into demolition derby arenas. After liberally infecting his hometown peers with rabies, Buster hits the big city and takes up with the Party Crashers. A series of deaths lead to a police investigation of Buster (long-since known as "Rant"—the sound children make while vomiting) that peaks just as Buster apparently commits suicide in a blaze of car-crash glory. This dark religious parable (there's even a resurrection) from the master of grotesque excess may not attract new readers, but it will delight old ones.
Publishers Weekly
Viciously incisive and lethally funny social commentary in a novel cast as an oral biography. Palahniuk's latest (Haunted, 2005, etc.) provides a parody of the oral biography format (Edie, Capote), offers homage to both James Dean and J.G. Ballard's Crash and serves to show just how much teenage angst has degenerated since the innocence of Holden Caulfield—all this before a time-warped finale that turns genealogy into some sort of Mobius strip. Though his voice appears minimally in the narrative, the hero (or is he?) of the novel is Buster (or Buddy) "Rant" Casey, who lives a short life of escalating destruction just to be able to do something, feel something and escape from the rural town that is living death to those who don't manage to leave it. A boy of peculiarly (even mystically) sensual intuition, he initially amuses himself by seeking bites from various animals and insects, launching a rabies epidemic as he passes his infections along through sexual encounters. With his move to the bigger city, he attracts a posse of "Party Crashers," joy riders who spend their evenings in wedding attire crashing into each others' vehicles. One crash kills Rant, who is dead (or is he?) as the novel begins and is eulogized by a Greek chorus of friends, neighbors, relatives and enemies, along with an eyewitness reporter for DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic and an historian whose involvement in the proceedings sustains a mystery through much of the novel. Many of the themes in the author's exploration of the dark underbelly of modern life and culture will be familiar to his ardent fans, but the formal inventiveness of the fictional oral biography provides a fresh twist. Not for everyone, but readers who like to walk on the novelist's wild side will rave.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Rant:
1. Are you a Chuck Palahniuk fan or not? If this is your first foray into his strange world, is he too funny to put down...or too macabre to enjoy? Or both?
2. Palahniuk always his sets his sights on a wider world than his fictional one. What is he taking aim at in this book?
3. What is Rant's problem? Why is he addicted to spider bites or car crashes...or any of this other violent behaviors? What is he searching for? Or is he at heart a nihilist?
4. Talk about the humor, the dark humor, in this book. What parts do you find especially funny, or maybe sardonic would be a better term.
5. Is Rant dead?
6. Why would Palahniuk portray his character through such widely divergent viewpoints? In what way are the accounts of Rant contradictory?
7. Talk about the phrase "boosting peaks" and how it applies to the process of reading this work.
8. What about Wallace Boyer, the car salesman? In what way is he a stand-in for Palahniuk?
9. Are you satisfied with the ending? Did you pick up on clues as you were reading...or did you have to go back and find them afterward?
10. What other books have you read by Palahniuk? If so, how does this one compare? (By the way, what about Rant's reference to Fight Club?) If you haven't read any other works, does this one inspire you to do so?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Unless
Carol Shields, 2002
HarperCollins
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060098896
Summary
“Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in the darkness, down to despair.”
Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy: Her three almost grown daughters. Her twenty-year relationship with their father. Her work translating the larger-than-life French intellectual and feminist Danielle Westerman. Her modest success with a novel of her own, and the clamour of her American publisher for a sequel. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner, with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck.
With the inconceivable loss of her daughter like a lump in her throat, Reta tackles the mystery of this message. What in this world has broken Norah, and what could bring her back to the provisional safety of home? Reta’s wit is the weapon she most often brandishes as she kicks against the pricks that have brought her daughter down: Carol Shields brings us Reta’s voice in all its poignancy, outrage and droll humour.
Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and laughter, Unless will stand with The Stone Diaries in the canon of Carol Shields’s fiction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 2, 1935
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Death—July 16, 2003
• Where—Toronto, Canada
• Education—B.A., Hanover College; M.A., Ottawa University
• Awards—Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction for Larry’s Party,
1998; Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries, 1995; National
Book Critics Circle Award for The Stone Diaries, 1994
Carol Shields's characters are often on the road less traveled, and the trip is never boring. She has written about a folklorist, a poet, a maze designer, a translator, even other writers—appropriate professions in novels in which characters struggle to find their own paths in life.
Shields often focused on female characters, most notably in The Stone Diaries, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel documenting the birth, death, and everything in between of Daisy Goodwill. Goodwill's story is told over a century, in various voices, featuring Shields's wry humor and her ability to convey what she has called "the arc of human life."
But don't pigeonhole Shields as a "women's writer." "I have directed a fair amount of energy and rather a lot of rage into that particular corner [of the] problem of men and women, particularly men and women who write and how women's novels are perceived differently from men's," Shields said in a 2001 interview. In 1997's Larry's Party, she swapped genders, writing from the perspective of a male floral designer who discovers a passion for mazes.
Unafraid to experiment with genres, Shields wrote an epistolary novel (A Celibate Season, coauthored with Blanche Howard), a sort of "literary mystery" about the posthumous discovery of a murdered poet's genius (Swann), and short stories (collected in Dressing for the Carnival and other titles). Though she often covered serious topics, she rarely did so without humor. Her novel of mid-life romance, Republic of Love, was called by the New York Times a "touching, elegantly funny, luscious work of fiction," an assessment that could be applied to the bulk of her work.
Shields changed her viewpoint yet again for Unless, but the circumstance was a tragic one. The book, which resurrects the main character from Dressing Up for the Carnival's "A Scarf," was written during the author's battle with breast cancer. "I never want to sound at all mystical about writing,'' she said in a 2002 interview, ''but this book—it just came out." Though not touching on her own illness, Shields did what she had always done—took her own questions and lessons, then used them to produce a story that speaks its own truth.
Shields passed away on July 16, 2003; she was 68.
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:
• When I was home sick as a child I used to take several volumes of the Encyclopedia to bed with me. We had a World Book Encyclopedia, which had quite a few pictures in color. I read the volumes randomly, browsing my way through them. I loved the hugeness of the world they confirmed for me, and the notion that that vastness could be organized and identified. You might think I would be humbled by the fact that people—individual intelligences—could become familiar with arcane material, but, in fact, I was deeply encouraged.
Here is Shields on were her favorite books (a fascinating list):
• Emma by Jane Austen. This book was written at the height of Austen's powers, when she felt secure in her footing.
• The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul. The subject is so complex and the approach so original, that I didn't think he'd make it to the end, but he did.
• The Rabbit novels by John Updike. You might think of this as the four books it is, or you might see it as one long novel of the life of an American male in the middle of the 20th century. It is a great accomplishment, this emotional documentation of a human life and the other lives that accompany him.
• Independent People by Halldor Laxness, the Icelandic Nobel Prize winner. This novel has an epic range, looking at the world sometimes through a giant telescope, then concentrating with a magnifying lens on the rambling thoughts of one particular child.
• I love all the books by Alice Munro, who has given the world new ways of looking at the lives of women. She has, in fact, reinvented the shape of the short story.
• Possession by A. S. Byatt captures what many novels leave out: the life of the mind and the excitement of intellectual reflection.
• Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. This book, published in the last year, is about family, about the delicacy and strength that weaves the family into a web.
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond made me believe (for about ten minutes) that I understood how the world was made. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Reta Winters — loving helpmeet to a doctor, mother of three cheerful daughters, and author of a successful comic novel — has always considered herself happy, even blessed. Then her eldest child, nineteen-year-old Norah, briefly disappears and resurfaces as a panhandling mute on a Toronto street corner, holding up a homemade placard that says "Goodness." Shields's ability to use Reta's darkest fears to reveal the order lurking in chaos, without ever losing her light touch (Laurie Colwin comes to mind), is nothing short of astonishing
New Yorker Magazine
Marvelously idiosyncratic, passionate and wise, Shields' tenth novel rollicks from beginning to end with sauciness and wit. The heroine is forty-four-year-old Reta Winters, who confesses her problems from the start: "It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now," she admits. The source of Reta's troubles is her firstborn, nineteen-year-old daughter, Norah, who recently dropped out of college and now spends her days on a Toronto street corner wearing a placard that reads "Goodness" around her neck. The reasons behind this erratic behavior are unclear. Reta obsessively wonders what went wrong while she attempts to write her second "comic" novel. The plot of Unless is secondary to its biting commentary, a fact that is destined to generate buzz among literary insiders but may leave readers looking for a traditional story less than enthralled. Plenty is said about the powerlessness of women, the absurdity of publishing and the denigration of our culture. The author laments the suppression of female writers by the male establishment, and she calls to task those who have elevated the lowest common denominator at the expense of originality, vision and talent. Shields never gets lost in the whorl of these discussions. Her feet are firmly planted, even as the pitiable. planet spins. —Beth Kephart
Book Magazine
"If I have any reputation at all it is for being an editor and scholar, and not for producing, to everyone's amazement, a fresh, bright, springtime piece of fiction," or so it was described in Publishers Weekly. That cheeky self-description sums up the protagonist of Shields's latest, the precocious, compassionate and feisty Reta Winters, an accomplished author who suddenly finds her literary success meaningless when the oldest of her three daughters, Norah, drops out of college to live on the streets of Toronto with a placard labeled "Goodness" hung around her neck. Shields takes an elliptical approach to Winters's dilemma, slowly exploring the possible reasons why a bright, attractive young woman would simply give up and drop out. As Shields makes her way through Winters's literary career, her marriage and the difficulties she and her daughter face in being taken seriously as women in the modern era, she employs an ingenious conceit by tracking Winters's emotions as she tries to write a sequel to her light romantic novel while helping a fellow writer, a Holocaust survivor, work on her memoirs. As Norah's plight deepens and the nature of her decision begins to surface, the romantic novel turns dark and serious, and Winters faces a rewrite when her long-time editor dies and his pedantic successor tries to introduce a sexist plot twist. Reta Winters is a marvelously inventive character whose thought-provoking commentary on the ties between writing, love, art and family are constantly compelling in this unabashedly feminist novel. The icing on the cake is the ending, which introduces a startling but believable twist to the plight of a young woman who, in doing nothing ... has claimed everything. The result is a landmark book that constitutes yet another noteworthy addition to Shields's impressive body of work. FYI: As revealed in an April 14, 2002 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Shields, who has terminal breast cancer, believes this will be her last novel.
Publishers Weekly
Unlike The Stone Diaries or Larry's Party, with their sweeping chronology of their characters' lives, Shields's new novel transpires over a few dark months. In elegant prose, it examines a woman's emotional journey following her eldest daughter's lapse into either asceticism or psychosis. The narrator, Reta Winters, lives with her physician husband, Tom, and three teenage daughters in a lovely suburban Toronto home. She has intelligent women friends and intellectual fulfillment translating the works of her mentor, an elderly French feminist. On the side, Reta is the author of a well-received novel of "light" fiction. However, the family's lives are radically transformed when her oldest daughter, Norah, leaves college and takes up begging on a Toronto street corner, wearing a sign saying "Goodness." Reta connects this act with women's essential powerlessness, while Tom suspects it to be post-traumatic stress. This remarkably liberal family maintains contact with Norah but doesn't intervene. Meanwhile, Reta distracts herself from her inner disquisition on loss, family, and the role of women by mentally manipulating the characters in her novel-in-progress and dealing with her fussy New York editor, who turns up just as the family crisis resolves itself. Finely detailed, thoughtful, and sometimes even humorous, this book is highly recommended for all fiction collections. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
From Pulitzer-winning Shields (The Stone Diaries, 1994, etc.), a tale about existential disarray that's spiked with feminist outrage and leavened with womanly wit. Until her daughter Norah begins living on the streets of Toronto in the spring of 2000, Reta Winters "thought tragedy was someone not liking my book." She and physician Tom Winters have been together for 22 years (although, mildly nonconformist children of the 1970s, they never married), and Reta has a modest literary reputation as author of a comic novel, My Thyme Is Up. Shortly after Norah leaves home, Reta starts a sequel, and we find her grieving and "at the same time plotting what Alicia will say to Roman" in Thyme in Bloom. Art sustains Reta, but its self-appointed interpreters infuriate her, and she writes letters to pundits who have ignored women's contributions to culture, an omission Reta gropingly feels has something to do with her daughter's turmoil. But because she's too suspicious of generalities to trust "the self-pitying harridan who has put down such words," she never mails them. Her first-person telling of all this, often quietly heartbreaking, is just as often bitingly humorous. Much of the fun comes at the expense of Reta's bombastic New York editor, who professes to find Big Issues in what Reta sees as light fiction but who proves able, in the story's most blistering development, to see Alicia as a stepping-stone to Roman's development. Typical of Shields's unerring pacing, this nasty revelation is followed by a crisis revealing why Norah became a street person. Reta's observations are so shrewd throughout, each detail so perfectly placed, that readers may not notice that the editor is the only other truly three-dimensional character. The philosophical questions don't emerge with the same brilliance as Shields's portrait of the writer or her modest claim for the importance of a female perspective on tragedy. Still, there's enough here to maintain her claim as one of our most gifted and probing novelists.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
• Goodness:
1. Many definitions for goodness are raised in the novel. Do you think that Reta ever comes to a conclusion about what goodness is? If not, do you think she has realized anything about the nature of goodness?
2. What do you think Norah means when she talks to her mother about not being able to love anyone enough because she loves the world more? Do you think that Reta understands what Norah is saying?
3. How would you characterize Norah's relationship with her mother? How do you feel about Tom and Reta's response to Norah's leaving? Would you describe them as 'good' parents?
4. Why do you think Norah decides to abandon her life and stand on a street corner? What do you think that "goodness" means to her? Does it matter that we never learn why the woman on the Toronto street corner set herself on fire?
• Distraction
5. Why do you think Reta spends so much time thinking about Mrs. McGinn and the envelope she found behind the radiator, even after she realizes that it's just a baby shower invitation? How much of what we know about Norah comes from Reta's imagination?
6. Why do you think it's so important for Reta to buy the perfect scarf for Norah? Do you think the scarf matters?
• Men and women:
7. Do you think there's any significance to the fact that Tom and Reta aren't married?
8. Consider the scene when Reta has the theory of relativity explained to her by Colin Glass. Do you think that Reta understands what Colin is saying? How would you describe the nature of Reta's tone in this exchange?
• Work:
9. Compare Reta and Danielle Westerman. Name the attributes you do and don't admirein each of them.
10. How serious do you think Reta is about her work? What do you think about the fact that she writes (but does not send) various letters about woman writers not being taken seriously?
11. What's the impact of Reta Winters being introduced through a list of her literary achievements?
Writers writing about writers writing about writers:
12. Are there ever times when you feel like Carol Shields is narrating the book? If so, can you identify particular moments when this happens? Do you consider this mixed narrative style effective? Why or why not?
• Silence:
13. Do you have any ideas about why Lois is silent for most of the novel? What do you think about the fact that she basically tells her entire life to Arthur Springer?
14. The novel's epigraph reads: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrels heartbeat and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of that silence". What do you think of this quote? Do you think it's an appropriate introduction to the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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